Another Arrest In Ticket Scam

A sixth person has been arrested following police investigations into a rogue online trader that allegedly collected money from thousands of fans and failed to deliver tickets.

SOS Master Tickets agency, which is no longer trading, may have taken as much as £3.5 million ($5.12 million) from fans hoping to go to shows including the V Festivals, Reading-Leeds and concerts by Madonna and George Michael.

The Serious Fraud Squad’s arrest of a 65-year-old man follows those of four men and a woman who were all picked up in November.

Association of Secondary Ticket Agencies’ chairman Graham Burns said the scam could have been avoided and claimed he tipped off the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), his local trading standards office in Westminster, London, and the Metropolitan Police computer crimes unit.

Last year, a second ticketing scandal rocked the U.K. market, with Xclusive Tickets filing for liquidation after failing to deliver any of the 18,000 tickets it sold for the Reading and Leeds festivals, the V Festivals and the Beijing Olympics.

Lane Bednash of insolvency experts Valentine and Co., who has previously dealt with the bankruptcies of Elite Ticket Shop and Ticket Tout, said Xclusive may cost music fans an amount “not dissimilar” to the £3.5 million SOS appears to have cost them.